


Of Burnt Veal and Vanishing Rings

by geekprincess26



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abundance of Mishaps, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Humor, Romance, proposal stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-24 20:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9785360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geekprincess26/pseuds/geekprincess26
Summary: Jon Snow planned the perfect proposal for his perfect girlfriend, Sansa Stark.  That was before circumstances made it decidedly imperfect.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day 13 of the Jon x Sansa Fanfiction’s 15 Days of Valentine’s challenge.

Jon Snow heard the knock at the door and cursed under his breath.

He did not curse over it, because he knew Sansa Stark was on the other side of the door, and he did not want to greet her with curses on her birthday.

Sansa Stark was the love of his life, his crush of ten years and girlfriend of two, and, Jon had hoped, fiancée beginning that night. It was a night he’d been planning for months, and now it was also a complete and utter disaster.

Long before Jon had asked Sansa if she would like to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday with a quiet dinner in his apartment, Jon had begun scouring the Internet with a frenzy. He’d pored over wine websites to locate the best vintage of California Merlot, Sansa’s favorite red wine, and lucked out on a 2009 Napa Valley bottle, which he had ordered delivered to his apartment on Sansa’s birthday. He had found an Etsy shop that custom-made candles in different shapes, so he had contacted the shop owner and asked for seven yellow candles crafted in the shapes of tulips. That took care of Sansa’s favorite number, color, and flower. And Jon had very nearly ruined his apartment’s kitchen testing various recipes he’d found online for veal parmesan and lemon cake, Sansa’s favorite foods. After much trial and error – he was, after all, a biologist and not a cook – Jon had finally found two he could get right repeatedly. This brought groans of relief from Sam Tarly and Ed Tollett, his best friends, who had eaten countless helpings of Jon’s many efforts and were now thoroughly sick of both foods.

During the few hours per week when he was not at work, with Sansa, or locating items for the proposal dinner, Jon had poured his heart and soul into designing not just Sansa’s engagement ring, but the jewelry box he had custom ordered to hold it. Surprisingly, it had proven much easier to locate conflict-free diamonds than it had been to find an artist who would create a ceramic jewelry box and design a glass mosaic cover for it that was fashioned to look like Sansa’s favorite picture of her and Jon together. Jon, however, had done both, and soon box and ring alike had been ordered and paid for. The week before Sansa’s birthday, he had received notifications from the jewelry store and the box designer that his items had shipped.

Jon had spent the next week scrubbing his apartment from top to bottom, as well as trying vainly to decide what types of flowers he should buy for Sansa. Yellow tulips and roses were her favorites, but when else in a woman’s life would dozens of red roses be more appropriate on the occasion of her engagement? Finally, Jon had decided he’d make up his mind on the day itself, since he had taken it off from work and would have plenty of time to find an arrangement at one of the local florist’s shops that would suit Sansa.

Unfortunately for Jon, he did not have plenty of time to buy flowers for Sansa. He woke up on the day of her birthday to discover that he had forgotten to set the alarm the prior night and had slept a good hour and a half longer than he had intended. This pleased neither Jon nor Ghost, his enormous white Alaskan husky, who liked being fed on a regular schedule and was whining miserably by the time Jon stumbled into the kitchen to get breakfast for them both.

After gulping down a bowl of porridge, Jon jumped into the shower, but no sooner had he done so than his doorbell rang. In his haste to grab a towel, he slipped on the floor and fell neatly on his backside. Cursing his clumsiness and the bruise he could already feel forming, he finally managed to fasten the towel around his waist and answer the door. On the other side he found a delivery messenger bearing the package from the Etsy candlemaker, and once he had signed for the package, Jon tore it open eagerly, feeling his luck was about to change. He stopped cold when he saw the package’s contents.

Seven beautiful, tulip-shaped candles greeted his eyes. Seven beautiful, neon green tulip-shaped candles.

Jon slumped onto the couch and sighed. So much for luck. He could get a refund easily enough, he supposed, but that would not make the candles yellow in time for Sansa’s special day. At least that made his decision about the flowers an easier one. If he could not give Sansa yellow candles, he could at least give her yellow flowers. Sansa especially loved the yellow roses whose edges faded into pink, so Jon decided to buy her twenty-nine of them – one for each year she’d blessed the world with her presence – along with a single red rose to celebrate their engagement.

That task, however, proved easier said and done. Sansa’s birthday was the day after Valentine’s Day, and Jon discovered to his dismay that that meant the local florists were running very low on roses, even yellow ones, and especially those of the quality Sansa deserved. He’d just left the third shop empty-handed when his phone buzzed. His screen informed him that the incoming message was from the package carrier that the jewelry box’s designer had selected to deliver it. Swiping right opened the full message, which informed him that the package had been delayed by a day due to a blizzard in Yorkshire. Jon barely made it to his car before letting out a stream of curse words that rarely passed his lips. Sansa might love the jewelry box, but love would not bring it to his apartment on time.

Eventually, Jon managed to force a few deep breaths into his lungs. He had no jewelry box and no proper candles, but that did not mean he could not still make the night a special one for Sansa. Sheer determination carried him to three more florist’s shops, and at each one he found a few yellow roses that would do nicely, although only two or three of the two dozen he’d managed to cobble together had the pink borders Sansa loved. But at the third shop, he located perhaps the single unblemished red rose left in the city, and that made Jon smile for the first time that day. He finally rounded out the number he desired with five yellow tulips, for a glance at his phone told him he had no time to pick through the contents of another shop if he wanted to get home in time to cook dinner. He did, however, make time for a quick stop at the market, where he bought seven miniature yellow candles. They were not shaped like tulips, but neither, after all, were they neon green.

No sooner had Jon gotten through the door of his apartment than the doorbell rang again. It was his second delivery messenger of the day, and this one carried the winery package containing his bottle of Merlot. While rummaging for a pair of scissors to open it, he glanced at his dining room table and realized he had forgotten to wash the tablecloth he had borrowed from his mother especially for the occasion. He threw it into the washing machine and hurried back into the kitchen to arrange Sansa’s flowers in a vase. He pulled one out of the cupboard over the stove, but lost his grip on it and watched in horror as it shattered on the floor.

By the time he had cleaned up the mess and found another vase for the flowers, Jon was well behind time on starting dinner. Nevertheless, he forced himself to double-check every ingredient lest he incur yet another disaster.

Soon the veal parmesan was baking away in the oven and the tablecloth safely ensconced in the dryer. Jon decided that another shower was in order, but first was a double-check of his phone and e-mail to see if the status of the package containing Sansa’s jewelry box had been updated. It had not, but Jon figured that as long as he was checking his e-mails, it would not hurt for him to send one to the Etsy shop from which the neon green candles had been sent to him. After several minutes of typing and backspacing, he managed to produce a message that he thought both conveyed the issue and avoided insulting the shop owner. He hit “SEND” and headed off to his bedroom to grab fresh underwear and socks. The sight of the underwear drawer reminded him that he had put Sansa’s engagement ring there for safekeeping when it had arrived two weeks prior, so he decided to dig it out and put it on top of his dresser. That way, he would see it straight away when he went to put on his tie and remember to wrap it.

It took perhaps fifteen seconds of fumbling through the drawer for Jon to worry, and another fifteen for his heart to leap into his throat.

The ring was not in the drawer. 

Jon panicked. He unrolled his boxers pair by pair, and pair by pair, when he found them empty, he tossed them carelessly onto the floor. Soon the drawer was empty, and Jon’s pulse rate was twice what it had been five minutes previously. He dug his hands frantically through his hair as he tried to think of any place the tiny box might have ended up. The only possibility he could muster was that of his having accidentally misplaced the ring in another drawer of his dresser while doing his laundry, so he wasted no time in emptying drawer after drawer. He even ordered Ghost away when the dog began to nudge his shoulder repeatedly.

Jon was on the second-to-last drawer when the smoke detector went off. 

As he made a mad dash for the kitchen, his eyes began to water and his nose to sting due to the acrid smoke wafting from the oven. It took him a split second to decide which source of irritation took precedence, but he finally grabbed a chair from the dining room table and climbed up on it to turn off the smoke detector. He leaped off the chair just as quickly and grabbed his thickest oven mitts to retrieve the ruined veal parmesan.

That was when the living room smoke detector took up its brother’s song, and that was when Sansa knocked on the door.

Jon let out a long sigh and ran his hands through his hair again.

“Jon? Jon! Are you OK?” The knocking on the door grew insistent, and Jon, realizing he no longer had a choice, opened it. Sansa’s nose wrinkled at once, and without prelude she sneezed into Jon’s face.

“Oh, Jon, no – I’m so sorry!” she barely had time to exclaim before sneezing again, this time into her elbow. Once done, she grabbed his shoulder. “Oh, gods! Is there a fire? Do you need me to get the extinguisher? Where’s Ghost?”

Jon held up a hand. “No, it’s all right,” he said, forcing back his wince at the irony of the statement. “No fire. I just burnt the food. Hang on.”

He retrieved the chair from the kitchen and headed off to silence the living room fire alarm. By the time he had done so, Sansa had begun sneezing again. Jon trudged over to the opposite wall, where he opened the windows and the patio door. He spent the next few minutes retrieving an oscillating fan from the storage closet and setting it up in the kitchen while Sansa had another sneezing fit on the patio outside. By the time she came back in, Jon was holding out a box of tissues for her. At least he hadn’t run out of those, he thought darkly, and then his eyes widened as he got a good look at Sansa. He’d told her to dress up for the evening, and she’d clearly pulled out all the stops. She was wearing a black dress that hugged her curves beautifully, along with all sorts of pretty gold jewelry and black Mary Jane heels with huge gold buckles, and she smelled like the perfume he’d repeatedly complimented her on when she’d worn it before. Naturally, she looked and smelled much better than he did on any given day, but tonight she was sparkling like a goddess and he was wearing a dirty old T-shirt and stinking of burnt food. 

“I’m so sorry, Sansa, I’m so sorry,” he groaned, collapsing on the couch in front of her. “You – you’re so beautiful, and here I am and I screwed everything up for your birthday. I wanted to make it perfect for you, I swear, but I burnt the veal parmesan, and I never got to making the lemon cake, and – ” 

“Veal parmesan? You cooked veal parmesan for me?” Sansa smiled at him the way she sometimes did when he gave her something small, like a shoulder rub or a new book for her Kindle, and she acted like he was Santa Claus on Christmas Day and had just brought her a bag full of gifts. Jon loved that about her, and now he felt worse than ever. Maybe if he acted like he’d only meant to get her dinner and gifts, and looked for the ring when she had gone, she still wouldn’t suspect the worst of it – except that he’d always been a terrible actor, and Sansa was more than intuitive enough with him to realize that something more serious was going on. He groaned again and buried his face in his hands.

“Oh, Jon.” He felt the gentle weight of Sansa settling into the couch next to him and the equally gentle touch of her hand against his back. “It’s all right. I don’t mind if it got burned. We can figure out something else.”

Jon shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he groaned again. He raised his gaze to hers, and she only looked concerned for him, not at all disappointed that he had let her down.

“I’m so sorry, Sansa,” he said. “You – I – you just deserve more than veal parmesan and lemon cake; you deserve everything else, and more than that, but the candles came out all wrong, and your present got delayed, and I couldn’t find the flowers – ”

Sansa’s eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “You couldn’t find the flowers?” she repeated.

Jon took a deep breath. “The yellow ones,” he said. “The roses you like.” Even after those two clarifications, Sansa still looked confused, so Jon took a deep breath and, beginning with his failure to set the alarm the prior night, told her about every mishap he had had that day. He did not divulge the contents of the delayed package from the jewelry box designer, and he kept silent about the ring, but Sansa did not seem to notice either omission.

Instead, she began laughing.

It started with a smile when he told her he’d awakened late, and a few giggles when he related the color catastrophe with the candles, and by the time he got to burning the veal parmesan, she was bent over her own knees heaving fit after fit of laughs into one hand and smacking the couch next to her with the other.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped in between convulsions. “It’s just – it’s so funny – one thing after the other – and you tried so hard – oh, Jon – ”

Jon stared, utterly bemused, as another fit overtook her, but it was interrupted by a crash from the direction of the laundry room. He and Sansa both dashed in to see Ghost scrambling off the dryer unit, and the laundry basket that had been sitting on top of the dryer but a few moments before overturned next to it on the floor.

“Ghost,” Jon growled, but the dog merely pranced away, as if pleased with himself for repaying Jon for feeding him late that morning. Jon sighed and bent down to pick up the basket, along with the clean clothes that it had been holding. He heard the sound of Sansa removing one shoe, then another, and she bent down to help him.

“It’s all right, you don’t have to – ” Jon began, but he was interrupted by a gasp from Sansa. He looked up to see her holding a very small, very familiar black box.

“What in the – ? I thought I lost that!” he exclaimed. “It was yours, and – Idiot! I must have – ”

His voice trailed off, and he remembered loading a pile of clothes from his dresser into the basket the prior day while shuffling things around among drawers. He’d thought when he had first put the ring in his underwear drawer that he’d tucked it far back enough that he wouldn’t touch it or push it around by mistake, but that idea itself had clearly been a mistake. 

Sansa gasped as though sucking all of the air out of the room. She had apparently taken the word “yours” literally, for she had opened the box and now sat motionless on the floor staring at the glimmering ring inside. When she finally looked up at Jon, her other hand was over her mouth, and tears were sparkling in her eyes. Jon sank to the floor next to her.

“I – I meant – I was going to give you – not that it isn’t yours if you want it, but I was going to surprise you,” he explained gently. “I was going to make you dinner and give you your presents and then give it to you, and – oh, I meant to ask you the right way, Sansa, I’m so sorry – ”

“Sorry?” Sansa’s voice, wobbly though it was, carried a hint of indignation, and she wiped a hand over each eye. “Sorry that you did all of these beautiful things for me, and then this – Jon, it’s so beautiful, it’s too much – ” She wiped both eyes again and wrangled her mouth into an adorable attempt at sternness. “And besides, you haven’t asked me yet.” Her face relaxed again, and this time she was not quick enough to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks. Jon reached out to wipe them off.

“Sansa Stark,” he said, putting a gentle finger on her chin so he could look her squarely in the face, “you are worth much more than all of the beautiful things I tried to do for you, even if I’d done them right. You are worth much more than anything I could ever say to you or give you. You are – you are so much to me, Sansa.” He rubbed one finger tenderly along her cheek. “I cannot give you anything like what you are worth, but if you’ll let me, I will give you everything I have for the rest of my life, Sansa. Will you let me? Will you marry me?”

He’d had many more words than that prepared, but they had all fled his mind. For one eternal moment, Sansa stared back at Jon, unblinking. Then fresh tears sprang into her eyes, and Jon realized his hands were shaking on her chin and cheek, and then his hands were on neither her chin nor her cheek, for she had thrown himself into his arms, dirty T-shirt and all, and Jon felt her heart beating right next to his and just as fast, and he squeezed both eyes shut so he could concentrate on the quaking, sweating, real feel of her. By the time Sansa pulled back, both of their eyes were wet.

“Yes,” she said, no longer trying to wipe away her tears, and she launched herself back into Jon’s arms and kissed him.

A while later, they made their way back into the now aired-out kitchen, and Jon noticed the unopened box still sitting on the counter. He grinned – well, grinned wider.

“If one of your presents did make it here,” he said, cutting open the box, “it’s the one we both need most.”

He reached in and promptly removed a bottle of 2010 Riesling.

Two hours later, they were swirling glasses of actual Merlot at a corner table in Sansa’s favorite Italian restaurant when the waitress approached them and apologized that she had not served Sansa’s lemon cake yet.

“The cook burnt it,” she explained. “I am so sorry. If you’d like to wait until our next one is out of the oven and cooled, it will be about twenty minutes. Otherwise, I can get you any of our other desserts – on the house, of course.”

Sansa put a hand over her mouth, and Jon could tell she was trying to stifle another fit of giggles. She successfully swallowed them down and smiled at the waitress.

“I’ll have the chocolate mousse cake instead, please,” she said, glancing sidelong at Jon. “My fiancé here still owes me a lemon cake out of his own oven.”


End file.
